Flex (18 page)

Gunza laughed and licked his palm clean.

“Move out,” he barked. “We got more company coming.”

P
aul had
lots of time to think about Aliyah while he was chained to a radiator.

It had been two weeks, during a critical time in Aliyah’s healing process. Maybe she’d been moved to a different hospital. Maybe Imani had wrangled the treatments Aliyah needed. Maybe Aliyah had beaten Super Mario.

Maybe Aliyah had died.

I’m sorry
,
Aliyah
, he thought.
I’ve killed you
.

No, you didn’t
.
You rescued her. The doctors said she’d inhaled enough smoke to kill her
.

He remembered Aliyah shrieking as he put his hands on her, the smell of her roasting flesh. That was what ’mancy did. You changed the world at your loved ones’ expense.

Paul was beyond a normal life. Whenever he thought of forms or organization, the Beast stirred. Even though Gunza beat him, shot at him, screamed at him, Paul couldn’t stop.

Magic welled up from the core of Paul’s being, an extension of his personality. Paul
believed
organization was how humanity surpassed raw instinct. Mankind needed to keep records for fairness, rules to create level playing fields, laws to punish cheaters. Remembering and enforcing these things improved the world.

If he abandoned those beliefs, what kind of a father would he be?

If he
didn’t
abandon them, what would he do to Aliyah?

“It’s better this way,” he muttered, squeezing his stump. Even if he could slip the handcuffs, the guards outside would catch him crawling to freedom.

Had he ever thought he might catch Anathema? A cripple like him? Hell, he couldn’t even tell the difference between a videogamemancer and… whatever the hell Anathema was.

At least he’d saved Valentine. He hoped. She’d been in bad shape the last time he’d seen her, and maybe SMASH had gathered her up after he’d healed the broach, but… he had no way of knowing, so he chose to believe that Valentine was off somewhere, happily playing her Nintendo.

Paul’s world had been reduced to Gunza’s reality shows, a cut that never healed, and the rusty radiator. Sometimes he nodded off and hit his head on that sharp-edged heater, causing flowing head wounds.

Gunza cleaned Paul’s injuries. But no matter how thoroughly Gunza iodined, alcoholed, gauze-taped, or Bactined the broach wound on Paul’s forearm, it always drooled blood.

Gunza had stopped feeding Flex to his guards. They hovered about the tenement Gunza had lucked into, attending to Gunza incessantly like overeager birds that plucked scraps from hippos’ teeth.

Gunza munched Flex and locked himself inside the apartment, watching endless episodes of
16 and Pregnant
. The sameness drove Paul mad. He’d wake to a pregnant teen from North Carolina and doze off to a pregnant teen from Connecticut. Paul knew Anathema was still attacking – sometimes, when Gunza flipped channels, he caught maddening glimpses of CNN – but how bad were things?

A black girl from Michigan gave a speech about the responsibilities of being a parent, holding up a child who looked so much like Aliyah that it made Paul’s heart ache.

“What the
fuck
?” Paul hissed.

Gunza stirred, a cat wondering if it had heard a mouse.

“You killed your brother,” Paul said, clambering up onto the radiator. “You killed your enforcer. Now your family, and SMASH, and Lord knows who else are gunning for you. You’re keeping me from my child, my daughter who is doubtless
frantic
because she thinks her
daddy
is
dead
…

“…and for what? So you can sit here, getting fat, waiting for the hammer to fall? You’re a failure, Gunza. You can’t manage an organization without a family to catch your sad ass. You’re waiting for someone to take you out. It’s pathetic.

“If you’re gonna commit suicide,” Paul finished, “leave me the fuck out of it.”

Gunshots from outside. Gunza glanced in their direction like the kitchen timer had announced his TV dinner was ready. He strapped on his gun holster, then sat before Paul, legs crossed, an old 1960s hippie about to deliver a lecture.

“Been thinking,” Gunza said. More gunshots, screams, accompanied by the pressure of a new ’mancy Paul could not name. “I’m out of the business.”

“…you are?”

“Naw. Why do you play the game? Money? Pussy? Excitement?” He patted the tub. “That’s all in these crystals. That’s the error. All the other drugs I sold were an escape from a crappy life.
This
drug
rebuilds
lives.”

Gunza padded over to the kitchen table as bullets punched through the kitchen walls, spraying dust and shattered tile into the air; he walked through gunfire like a man in a dream. He bent down to pick up a sloshing gasoline canister, then plunked it on the counter.

“Problem is, they seek me,” Gunza continued, as if people weren’t dying outside. “You take an eye, my family takes your skull and fucks it. We are factories of retribution. So how do you stop vengeance?”

A pube-mustached sad sack kicked in the door, clutching a Colt .45. It looked ludicrously large in his pasty hands. Behind him, the hallway was piled with bodies; an apartment of gangsters had tried and failed to stop this nebbish with a gun.

This guy?
Paul thought. This
guy slaughtered Gunza’s bodyguards?

Then he felt the Flex.

It was a lower-grade Flex that gave him an instant headache – there was something migraine-inducing in that ’mancy, a fingers-on-chalkboard interference pattern that battered Paul’s beliefs. Flux boiled around the reedy gun-kid in toxic clouds. He was a thunderhead, ready to explode.

Gunza didn’t seem to care. He popped a fresh crystal and leaned into the gun, daring the nebbish to shoot.

The nebbish… broke. It was as though Gunza had woken a sleepwalker. The sad sack sobbed, looking back at the bodies with near-suicidal remorse…

Gunza brushed debris off his shirt, then opened the cap on the gasoline.

“We’re gonna die in a fire,” Gunza said, splashing gasoline all around the room. “Then we’ll go somewhere remote. No inspectors. No SMASH. And I’ll set up a lab, and you’ll be my Flex bitch.”

Paul clambered up farther on the radiator. He wished he could stand on two feet; people who used the saying as a metaphor for manhood never understood how childish hopping around made you feel.

“I’m not doing that.” Paul hated the petulance in his voice. “That’s not happening.”

Gunza flicked a match. The flames curled around Gunza, the Flex pushing them away, but Paul had no such protection. The radiator steamed as the flames snaked across the floor. He yanked at the cuffs, trying to free himself.

The kid screamed something unintelligible and fired. The flux centered on the gun, blew the top of his head off. The kid tumbled to the burning floor, remains-of-face-first, blood sizzling into gasoline.

Gunza glanced back, as if surprised that hadn’t happened already, then returned his attention to Paul.

“Then I burn you like a marshmallow,” Gunza reiterated. “And I find your daughter, and I burn her worse.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“My father always told me, if you got to make examples, start with kids. Kill a kid, you yank the parent’s heart out.” Gunza rubbed the tub, an act akin to summoning a genie. “Don’t think I won’t. I’ll get away with it, too.”

But what would you do with more Flex?
Gunza had already killed a house full of gangsters, had taken to torturing subordinates – he’d doubtless find more exciting ways to kill people. Powered by Flex as he was, no one could stop him.

It was getting harder to breathe; the flames and the smoke were starting in earnest now, getting a good bite on the wood. The air tasted like Aliyah’s screams.

“You have to be stopped,” Paul gasped.

“Who’s gonna stop me?”

That’s when the kid – headless, shirt aflame, and still thoroughly dead – grabbed Gunza with stiffened fingers.

G
unza let
out a shriek that satisfied Paul on levels he had never known he could be satisfied. It was like drinking cold water after days in the desert.

Gunza fired three shots through the dead kid’s scrawny chest, which did nothing at all. The dead bodyguards in the hallway moaned, their tattoos crisping as they stumbled through the burning doorway, hands flapping at the end of broken arms, going for Gunza.

“You
fuck
!” Gunza said, frothing, emptying a clip into his former protectors. “You! Die!”

The headless dead kid, unimpressed, slapped the tub of Flex out of Gunza’s hands.

Flex spilled everywhere, crystals crackling as they caught fire. They went up like popcorn, bursting into careening pinballs of neon ’mancy. Some entwined with the flame to create bright streaks that erased whatever they touched, eating holes in the floor. Some rolled into the zombies’ ankles, who shuddered and healed themselves.

Paul squeezed his eyes shut as he recalled his power to him. The balls veered towards him – but Gunza shoved the dead nebbish aside to grab at them, his hands blistering as he intercepted the rolling balls of ’mancy…

…and they angled away from his fingertips, moving like fighter pilots in formation as they blasted through the kitchen wall, reducing the cabinets to splinters, bursting every last barrier between the kitchen and the apartment next door until only flames remained.

Valentine stood among the flames, brandishing a clipboard.

She wore an eye patch over her left eye, covering the gap where the SMASH agents had shot her. Her gothy prom skirt fluttered around her tattooed ankles as the stray Flex poured into her.

“
I
get all the power-ups in this game,” she said.

“
Shoulda
known
!” Gunza screamed, going for the biker’s shotgun. “Been stockpiling ’mancy for weeks in case you showed.
Bring it on!
”

He brought the shotgun up in Valentine’s direction. Paul lunged at Gunza, his wrist nearly breaking as the handcuff hauled him to a halt; with Gunza’s Flex neutralizing Valentine’s ’mancy, that shot would kill her.

Valentine shrugged. “Every power-up runs out.”

She flicked the clipboard in Paul’s direction.

Gunza directed his attention at the clipboard. A rain of burning timber tumbled from the ceiling, ready to bury it…

This is
my
’mancy
, Paul thought, feeling insanely possessive.
You can steal my magic to dodge bullets, keep me imprisoned, even kill Valentine… But I am the fucking king of paper.

Paul heard the Beast roar as he held out his hand, a sound like a million dot-matrix printer hammers falling at once, the sound of a billion file drawers slamming shut.

The clipboard sailed underneath the fire, arced around like a Frisbee to land in Paul’s grip. And when he saw what Valentine had sent him, he laughed – because the clipboard held an answer so simple that he couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to him:
Revocation of Contract
.

“
What the fuck you laughing for, papermancer?
” Gunza yelled. “
You got no pen! What you gonna fill out, fucker? You dry!
”

“There are commitments far older than pens.” Paul held up his bloody arm, as best he could. Then he smacked his dripping hand onto the “signature” portion of the paper.

Contract
.

A booming sound. A sparkling firework hiss as the freed ’mancy flew into the air. The former Flex crystals gathered the flame in wispy, ill-formed arms, bringing bouquets of fire to Paul in silent offering.

He lowered his head, dismissing them.

Paul could not have told you why. He could have aimed the magic at Gunza, burning him worse than Aliyah. He could have reabsorbed them into his body, filling up on flux-free ’mancy; freed, they seemed to remember who they’d belonged to.

But his magic had been trapped for weeks in cold cages of hematite. Putting them to service seemed… disrespectful.

So he gave thanks and let go.

They bowed in gratitude before dissipating.

Gunza backed away – fearful, not beaten. The zombies shuffled towards him. He swung the shotgun towards Valentine.

“Back off,” he said. “Or I’ll ventilate.”

“Really, Gunza?” Valentine glared skeptically from her good eye. “You’re gonna kill me with a shotgun…
in my own videogame
?”

Undeterred, Gunza fired. A red life bar blinked into existence above Valentine’s trimmed black bangs, a slim fraction chipping away as the gunfire ruffled her dress.

She reached behind her, making an audible
clack
.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said conversationally, as the gangbanger zombies immobilized Gunza. “I blamed myself for Raphael’s death for, like, a week. Then I realized if you hadn’t lent him the money, this would never have happened. He was a terrible risk. Any competent loan shark would have seen he’d never pay you back. You lucked out and got me – but realistically, all you should have gotten for your trouble was ten lost large.”

When Valentine took her hands out from behind her back, she held a large, hi-tech bazooka. Her knees buckled as she balanced it over her shoulder. A viewfinder popped out, producing a green radar screen that focused on the spot between Gunza’s eyes. Gunza begged for mercy, yanking at the arms of the kids he’d killed as he struggled to free himself…

“I hate killing people,” she sighed.

Gunza brightened. Then he looked down. His body had morphed into another nameless zombie.

Valentine grinned.

“But I
love
killing monsters.”

She fired.

Gunza’s organs ricocheted off the ceiling.

The other dead kids sagged, dissolving into pixels. Valentine let out a whoof, tucking the bazooka behind her back where it conveniently vanished, then picked her way through the kitchen’s remains. The apartment complex was still aflame – but this was a natural fire, picking up speed but not deadly yet.

“I thought you might not come,” Paul said, as she knelt to free him.

She scowled.

“No, I knew you’d come for me if you were alive,” he clarified. Valentine untensed. “I never doubted. But I worried that the, you know, broach… or maybe the SMASH team…”

“Oh.” She shook her head, grinning. She hiked up her shirt, revealing angry lightning-mark scars across her plump belly and breasts. “That broach will
fuck you up
. We gotta figure that shit out. I don’t know what you did, but you keep doing things you shouldn’t do. You reknit a broken universe, then get punked by a moron with a gun. You’re a paradox, Paul.”

“But… the SMASH team…”

“I’m Grand Theft Auto, Paul. They can’t catch me.” The sound of sirens. “Speaking of which, it’s time to go.” She tugged him into the hall.

“No.” Paul pushed her away, leaning against the wall. “I’m the hostage. When they come, I’ve gotta be here. I’ll tell them… tell them Gunza’s sanity dissolved and I finally got my shot at him.” He eyed Gunza’s gibbets, splattered across the kitchen. “It’s not
too
far from the truth.”

“All right.” Valentine hugged him. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

He sagged into her arms. “I’m gladder
you’re
alive.”

She lowered him to the floor, putting him well out of the flames’ reach.

“By the way.” She paused by the window. “Not a day passed without me stopping by the hospital to tell Aliyah her daddy was still alive.”

She leapt outside, grabbing the drain spout and sliding down.

Paul allowed himself one brief sob. Then he crawled down the hall toward the incoming policemen, bracing himself for what would happen once he told the world he’d killed yet another ’mancer.